Never, Ever Give Up. The Story of the Tiniest Domino: Sunday musings…3/22/2026
March Madness is upon us. The first four days of the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament is famous for its plucky underdogs. Occasionally one actually nips a much higher ranked opponent, ruins a couple billion brackets, and makes us all believe in the little guy.
The guy who believes. The guy who never gave up.
Which reminds me of a video that has made its viral rounds on various social media places of a rather earnest-looking professor-like guy talking about the power of a tiny domino falling and hitting a bigger domino on its way to the ground. He starts the dominoes tumbling. The cascade of 15 ends with the fall of a domino weighing 100 lbs. and measuring >1 meter in height.
All from a domino so small he needs tweezers to place it.
The Professor ends the video with the observation that a 29 domino cascade would finish with the fall of a domino larger than the Empire State Building. Pretty vivid. As is so often the case on Sunday mornings I let the video rumble around between my ears for a bit. What I saw first was a vast space filled with thousands, nay millions of those tiny dominoes, falling down over and over again, never striking anything but the ground. Every now and again a tiny domino would fall against a massive domino, either bouncing or slowly sliding off, eventually finding its way to the ground either way.
It was discouraging to think about. It made me a little sad, to tell you the truth.
But as I thought about it a little more, spent a bit more time in my imaginary vastness filled with tiny dominoes perpetually falling, it occurred to me that in order to fall over and over again it was necessary for each of those tiny dominoes to somehow rise up to stand. More than that, each time one fell it moved a little bit. Sometimes further into the vacuum of the vastness, but sometimes closer to another tiny domino. Another domino falling.
In my minds eye I see that tiny, first domino all alone, surrounded by a vast nothingness, falling ever so quietly over and over again. I see thousands, nay millions of them, all falling again and again, striking nothing on their descent. On first blush it makes me a little sad. A bit discouraged.
I keep watching and after awhile it dawns on me that in order to continue to fall over and over again, each tiny domino must somehow rise up, pick itself up to stand once again. Over and over they must rise. And it’s the little ones that persevere; once tumbled the larger the domino the less likely it is to rise again of its own accord.
The greatest flow, one that might topple a domino the size of the Empire State Building, must start from the movement of one of those tiny, lonely dominoes. The ones that kept getting back up.
Another domino that kept getting back up.
It’s probably trite–some would say I specialize in trite–but what stayed with me in the end was not the image of the massive domino falling at the end, but that of the tiny, delicate, fragile domino in the front of the line. The one that started the whole thing. What most of us ever see is the last couple of dominoes falling, the last tumblers settling into place. Who knows how many times that first, tiny domino fell and struck nothing but earth?
And got back up.
I’ll see you next week…
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